SharePoint 2013: Optimize your development Environment

SharePoint 2013 demands more resources – especially more memory. When we need to setup a SharePoint 2013 environment we can optimize resource usage in the development server by provisioning/configuring required services as well as following some other guidelines listed in this post.

Search Service Applications

Search Service is EXTREMELY resource hungry. noderunner process (Search Service process for crawling/indexing) is widely known for it’s resources usage footprint. In case you don’t need search service in your development server, you can delete the service application or at least stop the service. If you need to use the search service from time to time, you can keep the search service application running but stop the search service. However, if you try to stop the search service from windows service, you will find the service will be started again by SharePoint. The correct way to stopping service is from Central admin as shown below:

If you need the search service components (crawling/indexing) on development server, you can reduce the performance level by running the following command in SharePoint PowerShell. More information available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608126.aspx.Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService -PerformanceLevel ReducedYou can also control the noderunner memory consumption by changing ‘memoryLimitMegabytes’ in the config file “C:Program FilesMicrosoft Office Servers15.0SearchRuntime1.0noderunner.exe.config”. Please remember, changing the value to too low might cause the search service to fail.

Provision Required Service Applications only

If you install SharePoint using Installation wizard, different service applications are installed but you many not need all of these service applications. From Central admin you can delete unnecessary Service applications as well as stop services. As you can see below

Stop unnecessary Web Application

Even web application running in your development environment will create w3wp process (if a separate application pool is used) or at least use resources. So if you don’t nee a web application for time being, you can stop the web application as well as related application pool from IIS Manager.

Visual Studio IntelliTrace

If you use Visual Studio debugging in the server and your Visual Studio supports IntelliTrace and the feature is enabled, you can disable the option. That might improve your debugging experience. More information on how to enable/disable the feature can be found at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264948(v=vs.100).aspx

Multiple Disk Drive

If you have configured multi-server farm, you can keep some servers in another disk drive. For example, I’ve a multi-server (4 servers – AD, SQL, WFE and App) farm and I’ve kept two servers in my external USB3 supported external drive. So rather than four server vying for the same disk access, two are vying for internal disk access and other two are vying for external disk.Even if are running a single server farm, you can use an external SSD drive (or USB3) for better I/O throughput. Especially if you can move your database files in an external drive, you will experience much better performance.

Tracing Service

SharePoint uses a windows Service ‘SharePoint Tracing Service’ for logging. sometimes, like during deployment, you will find the log file is growing few hundreds megabytes in short time. So tracing service might take a bit role in performance. If you don’t need the log file for a period of time, you can disable the windows service. During development I usually disable the service and when I need to see the log file, I enable the service.